Compartmentalized containers are an increasingly-used type of container used for holding items such as prescription and non-prescription medicaments, nutriceuticals, and other things, such as parts. Each compartment of a compartmentalized container may be sized and shaped as desired to hold one or more item and may, for example, be arranged in a pattern enabling the compartmentalized container to hold the items in a desired order or sequence.
For instance in the healthcare field, a pharmacy such as a retail pharmacy, a hospital pharmacy, a long-term care facility pharmacy, and/or a mail order pharmacy, may utilize compartmentalized containers for fulfillment of patient prescription orders. The pharmacy may load compartments of the compartmentalized container with medicaments in accordance with a patient prescription order and may arrange the medicaments in the sequence in which the medicaments should be taken by the patient according to the prescription order, for example at breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime. Once closed, the compartmentalized container may be provided to the patient as a single, convenient package.
Blister cards are a well-known type of compartmentalized container used, for example, by pharmacies for fulfillment of patient prescription orders and for providing pre-loaded unit-of-use type packages of medicaments, nutriceuticals, and potentially other items. A blister card may consist of a thin sheet of material with a plurality of cells, referred to generally as wells, provided therein. The well bottom and side walls provide a compartment for holding one or more medicament or other item. The wells may be of any desired shape and volumetric size, and may be of any number and arrangement. Each well may have an upper opening through which one or more medicament is loaded into the well. Typically, a closure, such as of paperboard, foil, or other material(s) is placed over all of the wells to close the blister card to provide a closed package. The closed blister card is then ready for delivery to the patient or other person, providing a convenient package for the medicaments or other items therein. The material used to make the blister card and wells is typically transparent, translucent, or otherwise light-transmissive, enabling a person to view the medicaments or other items within each well without removing the closure.
Certain blister cards are referred to as push-through packs. In a push-through pack, the material in which the wells are formed is collapsible by pushing with a human finger. The closure of the blister card may be breakable so that the medicament or other item within the well can be pushed through the closure and out of the blister card for use. In the healthcare field, blister cards may be used as compliance or adherence containers to facilitate compliance and adherence with prescription instructions provided by the patient's physician. For this purpose, the blister card wells may be provided in a quantity and an arrangement or pattern to correspond with a period of days, such as the days of a week, the days of a month, or the days of multiple months. The patient can access the content(s) of each well at the appropriate date and time, increasing the likelihood that the patient will follow the physician's prescription instructions.
As an illustration, a blister card with wells arranged for days of a week may include 28 wells arranged in four rows and seven columns. Each row may correspond to the time of day at which the medicament is to be taken (e.g., breakfast, lunch, dinner, bedtime) while each of the seven columns may correspond to a separate day of the week (e.g., Sunday-Saturday). The volume of the wells may be sized to hold any quantity of medicaments. As mentioned, information applied to the closure may indicate in text or symbolic form the time and day of the week at which the medicaments are to be taken. Such a blister card may conveniently provide an entire week's prescription medicaments arranged by time and day at which the medicaments are to be taken by the patient.
By way of further example, a blister card with wells provided for a single medication dose for each day of a month may include 32 wells arranged in a pattern of four rows and eight columns. A sufficient number of wells may be filled to meet the patient's needs for the month. The medicaments may be taken in the sequence in which the wells are arranged. Wells may be skipped or unfilled for days on which a dose is not required. More than one medicament type may be provided in each well if desired and the wells may be volumetrically sized accordingly.
Similarly, blister cards for multiple months may be provided with, for example, 60 wells arranged in a pattern of ten rows and six columns or 90 wells arranged in an offset pattern of ten rows and nine columns. In other embodiments, wells of a blister card may be arranged in a ring-shaped pattern, a rectangular-shape pattern, or in any other pattern. Near limitless patterns and arrangements of wells and well sizes may be utilized depending on the needs of the pharmacy or other provider.
In fields outside of pharmacy healthcare, it may be desirable to provide a blister card with any number and arrangement of wells for packaging of items such as nutriceuticals, vitamins, mechanical parts, decorative items or other things.
A disadvantage of blister cards in the healthcare field is that blister cards cannot be used easily as compliance or adherence containers, or as packaging generally, if more than one type of medicament is required to be in the blister card. This is because of the complexity of loading potentially different medicaments into the different wells of the same blister card. As can be appreciated, a typical blister card may include many adjacent look-alike wells and great care must be taken to ensure that the proper medicament is placed in the correct well, especially if there is a required order or sequence in which the medicaments are to be taken by the patient. Consequently, blister cards utilized in the healthcare field are frequently limited to use with just a single type of medicament in each well so that the blister card can be filled by an automated packager, such as a form-fill-seal machine.
It is the practice of some pharmacies to provide compliance or adherence containers by hand-loading different types of medicaments into a single blister card. Frequently, the instructions for such hand-loading are on written instructions printed sheet of paper. The technician or pharmacist must read the instructions, obtain the needed medicament(s), and then follow the instructions to load the medicaments into the appropriate well. This process must be performed for each well and each medicament for each blister card. From a human factors standpoint, hand-loading of a blister card with different medicament types using printed instructions is tedious and time consuming requiring many repetitive actions by the person responsible for loading the blister card. And, while quite unlikely, errors could occur because of the number of repetitive actions required and the need to take one's eyes away from the blister card to read the instructions.
Indicator-directed systems exist to increase the efficiency of hand-loading of blister cards with different types of medicaments. Examples are described in U.S. Pat. No. 9,672,327 (Chudy et al.) and U.S. Pat. No. 7,856,327 (Zieher). The pharmacist or technician follows the light(s) provided by the system and places a medicament into each well indicated by each light.
An important limitation of these types of systems, however, is that they are incapable of meeting a pharmacy's full range of needs with respect to fulfilling prescription orders. More specifically, the foregoing types of systems are limited to use with a single type of blister card. As discussed above, numerous different types of blister cards exist to meet the important need of providing a compliance or adherence container tailored to the unique prescription requirements of each patient. Existing indicator-directed systems are limited because the indicators are spaced apart from one another in a fixed position with the fixed positions in an arrangement matching the location of the well or cell which is to be loaded. If the blister card wells do not match the arrangement of the indicators, then the indicators are inoperative to instruct the user with respect to which well is to be loaded, verified, or possibly unloaded, and the blister card cannot be used with the system. This limitation effectively limits use of the existing indicator-directed systems to a single type of blister card, which is unsatisfactory for a pharmacy needing to utilize different types of blister cards to meet the varied needs of its many patient customers.
There is a need for a compartmentalized container loading system, apparatus, and methods which would improve the process of loading medicaments and other items into a compartmentalized container, which would facilitate more accurate loading of medicaments and other items into a compartmentalized container, which could be used with more than one type of compartmentalized container, and which in a pharmacy setting, would reduce the time needed to manage medicaments and other items, thereby freeing personnel for other important healthcare-related tasks and providing an opportunity to improve the quality of care which can be offered.